this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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What's the efficiency in taking 30% of almost all game sales on a platform? I know we all love valve, but the efficiency here is having a store that everyone has to use if they want to make sales at all.
Valve's 30% is high, sure. But you're not seeing the total cost of selling a game.
And yes, I've done this before.
Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.
You need to offer the actual game. If you're selling an indie game that's a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.
Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?
Now there's updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?
Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.
What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.
Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.
That's part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that's fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don't spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.
My time is valuable and worth 30%
Not to mention Valve's effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn't have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you're better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I'm either not aware of or couldn't list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It's much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there's no good-enough alternative, but that's hardly Valve's fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.
And... holy shit, I just found out he's Matt Gaetz' brother in law. That explains a lot.
Man, Epic must be patting themselves on the back for all the money they paid getting people to believe 30% was outrageous, because it's paying massive dividends.
It may shock you to know that before Steam, your options were to fuck off or offer your product in a store where you would only get 30% of the profit, with the rest going to the publisher, the retailer, licensing, etc. These days it's closer to 50% for physical copies, and Apple/Nintendo/Sony/etc all standardized with Steam on you getting 70% for digital.
Don't like it? Pull a Valve and make your own alternative that's better. If you build it, they will come... which is why nobody uses EGS.
EGS has become free games store.
EGS is like walking around a grocery store offering free samples and leaving without buying anything.
Sort of. Except all the shelves have weird lips on them to keep you from grabbing the product easily, you kinda have to wrangle each item. Also it's layout and design is archaic and super hard to navigate. And on every aisle there's these little 3 inch steps that you have to go up and down and constantly trip on, or your cart gets stuck on them and you have to lift it up or drop it down. And then if you do manage to buy things, their support is terrible; at the other store if you need help cooking they have a 24 hour recipe hotline to help you out, but this one promises the same, but you actually wind up on hold for hours half the times you call.
So they got tons of free samples, but all their products are kinda a nightmare.
~~Don't forget that each of their checkout lanes say "1 item or fewer"~~
Apparently they have a cart now
They actually have a cart now. Took them many years but they finally managed.
I don’t believe if you build it they will come anymore. People are fucking lazy and will put up with whatever the fuck is happening with Twitter for convenience.
They posted on lemmy
30% is more or less the standard. Not just in the games industry, but everywhere.
It's actually not the standard, the standard was iirc 70% for in-store at the time. These days I think it's closer to 50%, assuming no 3rd party losses/licensing.
Nintendo/Sony/Apple/etc are all 30% too, by the way.
The status quo is rarely a good reason for anything
Epic is 12%. Yeah, Epic store sucks and all that. Whatever. There's two marketplaces that aren't first party. One takes 30% and one takes 12%. How is there a standard? You can't look to other markets or other distribution methods to compare it to, because they're all different with their own things.
Edit: GOG is 30% for indie developers (there's a little more to it than that, but basically that). It sounds like with other publishers/developers they negotiate contracts on a case-by-case basis and don't say what they get.
Steam does more to promote and support games than many other platforms out there. Epic does not have workshop and forum, Google Play does not promote games as good as Steam.
Google Play ~~does not promote games as good as Steam~~ has ads.
The efficiency is doing it so effectively that on an open platform competitors can create there own store, pay for AAA games to appear on their store, take the smallest of pay cuts, pass it on to the consumer, and still have customers prefer to pay more to be in the Steam ecosystem. I'm against monopolies but Valve's is absolutely efficient.
Did you know that almost every other marketplace out there (except that fucked up one) has the same 30% revenue split?
The whole debacle over it is artificial. It won't change much if it looked better to people who complain now. It won't remove Valve's ability to provide the best service.
There is a difference though in that you do not have to publish on Steam for your game to be available on Windows or Linux or MacOS, but you do need to use the App Store to publish on iOS, so the 30% is mandatory there.
You can host your own site, you can publish on another app store, it just makes marketing harder.
There are other game marketplaces out there, but they're bad.
This isn't like the Apple App store where it's the only option on the platform. In fact, they've competed with Microsoft's store on some things. It's not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don't think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam's store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn't even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.
Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.
Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don't know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that's at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.
Personally I don't have any issue with 1st parties keeping their stuff 1st party.
It's just that I won't participate if I deem it useless (see Ubisoft launcher) :)
EG can keep Fortnite etc. exclusive on EGS that is their damn right.
I agree. It's a bit annoying for me personally but I don't really mind unless they have a shit launcher.
Also developers can generate a unlimited number of Steam keys for their games that they can sell on other platforms and steam doesn't take any money for. So you can make MyCoolGame throw it on Steam then sell copies of your game on MyCoolGame.com give your customers Steam keys and keep the whole price while still benefiting from Valve's infrastructure to support downloads, friend lists, updates ect.
Which is exactly what Apple does with their iTunes store.
Not exactly, apple forces their users to use their stores, whereas Valve just offers a better experience than the other stores out there.
There is nothing stopping you from using other stores to buy your games on, unlike the appstore.
Apple ties their hardware to iTunes with no competition. Steam offer a platform which is better than every other piece of COMPETING software on a variety of hardware.
Plenty of games that make good sales numbers that aren't on steam. Obviously it makes sense to go where the users are though
Some notable examples that aren't overly old include Overwatch 1, Minecraft, LoL, and Tarkov.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales/
I used to feel a bit sad about the 30% but then I learned you get stream keys for your games for free, which makes it seem a lot more reasonable.